No Turning Back
by Kuro Shi
Summary: There are secrets that Naruto and Sakura hide from one another, because one shouldn't talk about the dead.
1. Chapter 1

The grave was still empty, after three years, but Naruto visited it on several occasions– once on his birthday, of which there would never be another; once on the day he left, never to return again; and once on the day they'd received the certificate in the mail, written on thin, ceremonial paper, that told them they should stop hoping for word from him. "Uchiha Sasuke", it read, "should no longer be considered immersed or missing, but lost. He leaves behind no personal belongings which might be relayed to you."

Three times a year he stood in front of the plaque that commemorated his service, and words never seemed sufficient. He left incense and the bowls of food Sakura made and knew they were meager offerings, that the incense burned to ash and the food rotted and was eaten by animals. He stood and contemplated the past until his eyes blurred.

There was never anything to say and today was no different. The sun was suddenly hot on his neck and as he turned and squinted into the horizon, he realized dusk would fall soon. He gathered the empty dishes, somehow caked with dirt, which had been left last time he visited and they seemed small and brittle in his hands, like children's toys.

The darkening walk home was quiet and full of buzzing summer insects. The thrum of cicadas thick and constant in the humidity. A lantern on the porch was lit and as he drew nearer he fixed his eyes on the partially illuminated form of the girl that sat beneath it on her heels, staring at something held in her fist. It was a grasshopper, he realized, as he sat beside her, pulling off his shoes. "I'm home," he said. The dishes clinked beside him as he shifted.

"Dinner is already finished," she said. The grasshopper in her fist waved its free legs as she held a piece of grass to its face, her eyes crossed with focus. "Why won't he eat it?" Her thin shoulders hunched; she turned her face and was lost in her own world.

"You're supposed to say welcome home." He tapped her on the back of her head as he stood, shoving his feet into his slippers. "Let that go and wash your hands, if dinner is ready." He smelled peppers as he slid open the door, heard the sound of a wooden spoon in a simmering pot.

"Welcome home," a voice called. "Dinner's ready."

Naruto paused in front of the living room. "Hinata," he said.

She looked up at him, a large puzzle piece in each hand and the remaining scattered on the floor around her knees.

"Go wash your hands," he told her. "Your mom says dinner is ready."

She smiled her little girl smile, stood to flutter into the hallway, but he caught her shoulders as she passed and bent over her.

"Can you say, "Yes, Daddy?"" He looked into her blue eyes, so much like his own and saw only blankness. "Just say "OK" for me." She only raised her brows and smiled wider. A laugh escaped through her tiny, perfect teeth. Naruto smiled back. "Never mind." He released her. "Hurry up, OK?"

Sometimes he wondered why she didn't speak. Had he cursed her with a stutter, naming her as he did? He stared toward the hallway into which she'd disappeared. Hinata only giggled and smiled, even now, going on three. Tsugumi, it seemed, had always talked. But in the beginning he was afraid of fate's mark on her, too.

Maybe it was something they outgrew.

"Everything went well?" In the kitchen Sakura spoke into the sauce pan, stirring.

"Yeah," he answered. But three times a year when he couldn't help but ponder all the circumstances that begat their little family, he wondered whether the happiness he so often felt was real; and if it was, how long it would last.

"I made your favourite tonight," she said placidly, and took in her breath to sigh.

"Are you OK?" He lifted his head and saw her in fragments for a moment: the apron tied over her hips, her slippered feet, the shadow cast over her neck by her down-turned chin. She smiled slightly.

"I am if you are." For a moment her green eyes caught him. He felt a smile flicker over his lips.

"I'm fine."

Sasuke was dead, but his grave was empty. Maybe that left him free to wander every once in a while through the household, surfacing in the occasional dream, his memory buoyed by the brief glimpse of dark hair, a fleeting strain of low laughter; buoyed by these anniversaries of birth and death and leaving.

And his ghost summoned up all of the others. Jiraiya was suddenly a part of his everyday thoughts. Hinata too. Hinata, like Sasuke, left and never came back. Hinata didn't have a grave, though.

* * *

HYUUGA HINATA

Unrecovered.

Kidnapped by unknown assailants (see Crow Ring) while living outside of Hyuuga Compound. Presumed murdered. Motive possibly blood limit (Byakugan).

Funds retracted. Operational teams recalled. Further retrieval attempts by Konoha terminated; private searches may continue.

* * *

In January the full-scale search for Hyuuga Hinata was terminated. Uzumaki Naruto had spent nine months searching for her and two more praying that the next search was more successful. Each squad sent out returned empty handed. The Hyuuga family threatened neighboring countries and lost several members to heated skirmishes in places so far away it took days for anyone to know they were dead. The Hokage held long meetings with Sand, who'd heard nothing.

Soon they even stopped the tentative search for a body, and Uzumaki Naruto woke up in the late afternoons, squinting in the dusk of his apartment and cocooned by the four walls of his bedroom and its blinded windows, head pounding. His door seemed to be forever reverberating with knocks. It was Uchiha Sakura who visited so incessantly with leftovers from meals she'd cooked for two, forgetting her husband wasn't there to share dinner, or unwilling to accept that fact.

Uzumaki Naruto and Uchiha Sakura met often at the village gate: Sakura waiting for her husband to return from a three week mission that seemed to have taken half a year, and Naruto trying to grasp the truth: that the girl he loved was gone and never returning. Uzumaki Naruto listened to Uchiha Sakura's fears and worries; her growing resentment of a marriage to someone she didn't see often enough. Her frustrated tears forced him forced him to stifle his own. He visited her like she'd visited him – only to allay her loneliness. At first.

Uchiha Sasuke worked hard and long hours, even as his wife's eyes grew redder and redder at each parting. He was sought after, young and strong and skilled, asked for by name. The assignments came whether or not he wanted them. He continued to take the missions he was given, even as she wept and protested, even as she grew bitter and hateful, even after they learned she was pregnant. When Uchiha Sasuke left his wife at the village gate, she took to crying and gripping at his shirt sleeves; when she quieted and stopped seeing him off, he mistook the distance in her manner for placidity and understanding. He sustained himself with thoughts of her and the quiet knowledge of the fact that each hour he spent away, each mission he took, gained him a dollar and the security of an hour with her and the baby. His accounts grew as his wife's love for him faded away.

In her third month, Uchiha Sasuke's wife ripped the bag from his hand as he stood in the doorway, home for the first time in six weeks. She broke a bottle of alcohol on the floor and tried to drink another. And then she told him there was someone else -- because for Uchiha Sakura the days were long and the nights longer. Her husband came and went to his liking and only nodded, half listening, to her impassioned confessions of loneliness. Uchiha Sakura met Uzumaki Naruto often at the village gates, only by chance. They met in town, only for company. They had dinner together, only for old time's sake. Only for fun.

In the end, it was only because she loved him.

The very evening of the day he'd returned home for the last time, Uchiha Sasuke appeared in front of the Hokage to request a solitary mission – the longest and most dangerous she had – and a petition of divorce. Both were awarded, after an appropriate hesitation.

* * *

SUGI RYOTA, SUGI RIE

Retrieval Attempt 0104 (Failure)

Uchiha Sasuke's last transmission was recorded in Mist, four months after deployment. The information given to the agent stationed there is attached.

High turnover rate allows traffickers to quickly abandon temporary holding blocks; frequent splitting of teams. Sales have been recorded in various areas, predominately coerced labour, sexual slavery. Recommend further investigation into [names withheld]. Continuing to follow Sugi children, still not traded out. Chatter of genetic experimentation heard. Core of traffic seems headed to Snow. Will transmit in Kawanoue with further information. Uncompromised.

There is no Kawanoue transmission. The Crow Ring remains operational (Head unknown); Sugi children unrecovered. Further retrieval missions to be attempted upon receipt of new information and renewal of funding.

* * *

Tsugumi was three when she received the notice, and he found her sitting on the corner of the bed, her back straight and her arms over the swell of her stomach. It was like moving through water, walking across the room to meet her. Her shoulder seemed more angular than usual beneath his hand. Tsugumi loitered at the foot of the bed and watched, and said nothing.

"What's wrong?" he asked, and she held up the page fisted in her hand. The death notice.

"He'll never know now," she said quietly; and that was the first time Naruto had ever seen even a hint of Sakura's regret.

She slept late into the day and ate little, and he fought with her one night. "Why are you like this?" he asked. "You're ignoring your daughter, you're ignoring me!"

"Give me time to grieve," she said, but the child inside her was already a month older, and still somehow she looked thinner.

"Are you still in love with him?" he asked, and knew it was a question that should remain buried, one he didn't want to know the answer to, one she didn't want to hear. She cried so easily.

"How could you ask me that?" she whispered. Her hands smothered her stomach. "How could you ask that when you're the one who wants to name our child after her?"

"No," he said, and his shoulders sagged as he stood in the doorway. "I'm sorry." But he thought, _Hinata is different_.

Time changes a person. The baby was born and named and a plaque was erected over an empty grave. The months became years and their children grew.

At night he lies beside Sakura and realizes they breathe the same. He thinks, _it's supposed to be like this_. And he is happy.

* * *

In the morning it is eggs and rice, fish dried over fire, steamed greens and onions. The youngest still likes her egg with sugar; the oldest, it seems, no longer likes sweet things.

The fact sends a twinge of recognition down Sakura's back but it is forgotten before it is remembered.

Naruto reads over school reports and notices. The youngest draws often, but everything is alien looking and strange, and she can't explain it, or won't. "So this is a cat, then. The one outside the ramen stand?" Naruto says, nodding, and Hinata grins, laughs, chokes briefly on her egg. Sakura reaches for her but she's recovered, laughs again, picks at her food with her fingers.

"A cat?" she asks, and the picture suddenly makes sense, maybe, if she turns her head and looks at it from the corner of her eye. Hinata picks at limp spinach, puts it into her mouth, then pulls it out and places it on the table. "It doesn't go there," Sakura says, and pushes it into a napkin.

"You're getting too many 100's," Naruto sighs, and raises his eyebrows at the oldest. He scrutinizes the report in front of him. She has only spinach on her plate, and fish. Why? Sakura wonders.

"The classes are easy," she says, chewing.

"Rice? Egg?" Sakura holds the dishes out to her.

"Egg has too much chlestral," she complains. "Rice is empty calories." Sakura pauses, then spoons some of each onto her plate.

"Eat it all," she says, before Tsugumi can complain any further. "You don't even pronounce cholesterol right. What do you know about nutrition?"

"I want to be faster," she says. "I can't run with rice." But she eats it anyway.

At work she sees that Neji is visiting; he looks rundown, tired. She wonders how much longer he will look, why he obsesses so, and what his wife does the many weeks that he's away. But she is occupied before she can say anything to him; and there is little to say, anyway. That the nights are getting cooler. That she hadn't talked to Hanabi, and is she doing any better? That her children, and Naruto, were doing well. And how was he? All questions that are as meaningless as silence; what connection do they have anymore, she and he, anyway?

The evening is like the morning stretched out. Chicken instead of fish. Curry instead of rice. Watermelon popsicles for desert, but only for Hinata. Tsugumi runs after fireflies outside, instead, and hides from her sister in tall grasses. Naruto stretches on the porch and taps at her back reassuringly as she sits beside him. Just before sunset the world is a painting.

And Sakura is happy.


	2. Chapter 2

Dreams were so easy to confuse with reality in the first seconds that he woke. For a moment, he swore he was lying in bed, close to someone, and the blanket above him was thick and warm. Then the cold was suddenly in his bones, and the realization that he had no wife, no family, seemed to hit harder and faster than it ever had before. Those waking moments, spaces in time that somehow erased the past few years, had grown smaller and smaller.

His breath hung suspended over him, strangely viscous and visible. He stared at it and felt the heaviness of a half forgotten dream in the back of his head. It disappeared completely as he sat up, shivering in the grey light of his tent. The clothes he pulled on were stiff and scratchy with sweat and ice, the blacks faded and the whites yellowed. His chapped hands disappeared into gloves and he wrapped his feet twice before shoving them into worn shoes. The scarf he tucked into his jacket sent a wave of stifling heat over him, a sheen of sweat over his cheeks that froze the second he stepped into the open air.

Outside the snow swept over the underbrush in small, hard flakes. He turned his back to the wind as he pulled his shelter down. Two hours away a long, squat building, ice-covered and windowless, sat waiting for him. Maybe. And it was full of people, hustling and bustling, going in and going out. Maybe. And inside he would find the children he'd been sent after so long ago. Maybe.

Already there had been five years of maybe's and Sasuke wondered if he should be getting tired of them. But at home there was nothing waiting for him and work was all he had, and however terrible it was for the children he'd been sent after – were they still alive? he wondered – every time he came to an abandoned building, realized the information he'd been given was a lie or a dead end, packed up his bag to start the search all over again, he felt a sense of relief.

The building was squat and ice-covered and windowless. But it was quiet. Half the day he sat watching, squinting through the blowing snow, and there was no one. He snuck twice around the perimeter and there were no security measures, no illusions, no trap doors or escape hatches. The ground was ice and impenetrable. He found a half open door and retreated to bury himself in the swell of snow in the west to watch again, suspicion jerking nervously through his arms.

If he saw nothing else, in the morning he would enter through that door, find the rooms empty, used syringes, open file cabinets, and nothing else. It had always been like that. He was always one step behind.

* * *

It was usually so hot when she woke. Her face would be beaded with sweat, her hair hot and heavy on her back, like a carpet. Now, though, her skin was thin and papery. She bundled herself into her robe but it was thin, too. Her breath might be visible in the dark, like a ghost. She breathed all of the air in her lungs out, staring up toward the ceiling, eyes wide, but she couldn't see it.

Once her father had told her a story, back when she was too young to have become a failure, and he still cared enough for her to talk to her. He'd traveled to a country so cold the sleeping bags froze around those inside them. Waking, you had to twist and chip yourself from the ice. The clothes you'd worn were frozen in the pile you left them, and you shook them and beat the against the ground before you could wear them. She wondered how long it would take, if she breathed this hard, to fill the room with ice.

Near her, he was weeping. She reached for his hand and could not find it. "Just one more day," she wanted to say. "If we can just hold on for one more day..." But his weeping, so weak, drowned out her even weaker voice. Her words had no power in the cold air, and it was with a twinge of hot panic that she realized they had no power over her.

It was getting harder and harder to lie to herself.

(line break)

The ice turned in the rising sun, purple in the shadows. The compound remained still in the shrieking wind, unmoving against the ice that was so like razors against Sasuke's cheek. His back was wet with sweat but the cold struck at his hands and face, his feet, the weakest parts of him. He watched the compound and his blood rushed through him but his fingers stayed stiff, unbendable, turning to ice. The sun glittered in the trees but it was far away, with no interest in the earth, and so shone little warmth upon it. When it struck weakly against the compound, he moved.

There was the door, half open, inviting in the snow and ice. Pipes and creaking when he stepped inside. That and darkness. And cold. Every door inside, open. He walked past steel tables, empty jars, sinks of something frozen. There were a few knives, syringes, bodies, like always. Cryptic papers that he used to collect until he realized they mean nothing, and that's why they were left behind. Sasuke grasped a handle, turned it, yanked at the door; there was more useless information to be found, another bread crumb in the path for him, to spur him on, to keep him going, endlessly. He would never go home, never have to turn again to face--.

The door. Locked. The handle rattled in Sasuke's hand; he shook it in disbelief. A locked door, never. Why would there be a locked door, what would they need to keep locked up, hidden, in a place they had abandoned, a place they would never come again? Sasuke rattled the door, paused to wonder, and then he heard it.

The coughing.

* * *

The boy is dead, but too young to shave. "My sister," he gasped, "my sister," and held out his fist -his fist, he could not even open his fingers – and Sasuke recognized him as easily as he might recognize his mother, or his wife, or his child (but he did not have any of those). And he pulled him close, laid a hand on his young head – to comfort, not to save, because the weak, fluttering beat beneath his fingers, he knew, couldn't last. Was it callous to leave him there, alone now, no matter the promise to return? Sasuke closed the door on him and knew it was only a body now, no boy at all but a lump of flesh fashioned to resemble one.

He'd been so long in the winter; there was ice in him. There was too much white and his eyes were filmed with it. But these were the things that he remembered were beautiful: blood in water and the red flag of his elementary school class; the lavender air of morning and a moon as yellow as the sun; the inside of a wrist and the pulse that sounded beneath his fingers.

The sister shuddered, breathed, and Sasuke realized he would be going home.

* * *

He swaddled her in every piece of cloth he owned, but her eyes didn't open. He chafed her feet and ran his palm over the crooked fingers of her left hand, the dry skin of her right. There was only a sliver of white visible between the lashes that quivered at every breath.

It was impossible to take her, unwaking, and the body over the one hundred miles that lay between him and the previous town; so he left her buried in fur and cloth to bury her brother in the ice and snow. Someone else would have to come for him. The needs of the living out weighed those of the dead, and all he could spare was a this small moment, a prayer, and a marker. When he turned from it the the black of trees was visible far on the horizon. He realized that there was no longer snow in the air.

The girl slept.

* * *

It was the next night before she woke. Sasuke held water to her lips but she wouldn't drink. Her weak hands fluttered against his wrists, she turned her head away. She tried to speak and couldn't, tried to open her eyes but gave up before anything but a sliver of white was revealed beneath the heavy lids.

"Drink something," he urged her. Her lips were chapped and white and she pressed them together. Her head shook weakly on her neck; the blood pulsed visibly through it in delicate, blue channels beneath her skin. Her eyes roved behind her lids, but she could not lift them; her fingers groped at the ground at her side.

She was looking for him, he realized, the brother, the boy whose body he'd left behind. She didn't know he was dead and buried; he could no longer drink, no longer eat, no longer accept any further sacrifice she was willing to offer. The wind shrieked outside the tent.

He laid his hand over hers, carefully as he could, and she shrank away from him, drew her shoulders against her ears as if anticipating his words. "I'm sorry," he said. "It's only you and me."

Her lips parted; she was completely still and silent as she cried.

* * *

"Who did this to you?" he asked her, but she had been silent two days, her eyes closed and her head turned from him; she spat out half of what he pressed into her mouth. "You have to eat," he told her. She held her thin wrist over her eyes and it seemed every moment he glanced at her there was a new, silvery path on her cheek. She pulled her fingers into a fist but there were two crooked ones – the little finger and medicine finger – that wouldn't curl. "Who did this to you?" he asked, but she didn't make a sound.

On the fourth day he woke and found her sitting up, leaning heavily on one hand. She shivered. Her face tilted away from him as he lifted himself from beneath his blankets.

"Where are you taking me?" Her voice was a whisper.

"Konoha," he said, and her shoulder twitched. She said nothing else, but her hand reached absently toward the tent wall, shaking. Her thin arm – he wondered how it could possibly bear her weight, no matter how slight it was.

"Will you eat?" he asked. "Are you cold?" She tucked her head further into her chest the closer he came. She shivered and he pulled another blanket over her legs. "If you eat," he said, "we can start moving. Somewhere warm. If we hurry it might still be summer in Konoha."

She bent her elbow and turned from him onto her side. Her thin arm folded beneath her like a broken twig.

"Will you eat?" he asked her.

She concealed her face in blankets and said nothing.

* * *

At night she could hear him breathing; sometimes he sounded near, sometimes far. Sometimes the wind made it too hard to hear anything. She shifted and coughed, and wondered if he would wake. She hoped he would, then hoped he wouldn't; she hoped he died in his sleep and listened desperately for the sound of silence where his breathing had been.

Konoha, he said, and she'd turned her face so he wouldn't have the satisfaction of seeing her eyes widen in that first, uncontrollable moment of joy that washed over her, painfully brief, before doubt once again consumed her thoughts. She couldn't trust him and she turned away because, she knew herself, and knew she was too easy to deceive; a kind word, soft touch, could easily sway her, and she'd been lured by the false promise of rescue before.

But to hear him breathe made her ache to believe. The earth spun beneath her in the darkness and she couldn't sleep for being so tired. It would be easier to take his word, trust him, even if there was no truth to him. How long had she hoped for a real savior? Wasn't it time to give up and give in?

She reached out before she could stop herself. Her body was as tired as her mind, had needs of its own, a will to survive even if her mind might forfeit it. She grasped something – a shoulder, an elbow, and he woke.

"What's wrong?" he whispered. She opened her eyes to search for his face but the darkness was complete. What did she want to say? Why did doubt have to wreck her even more so than hopelessness ever had? He shifted; there were fingers on her hand. Caring fingers, careful fingers; or did they belong to those hands that encircled her wrist like irons, that held her chin like a vise in place, that had taken everything of worth from her?

"Thank you," she said, cautiously. The hand covered hers, squeezed at her palm, reassuringly, she thought, and she pressed the back of her wrist to the tears in her eyes. Please, she wanted to say, please be closer to me, but instead she drew her hand from his; and even then she felt as if she were giving up, losing. Tomorrow, she knew, she would take the food and drink he offered, and the promise of a homecoming, as false as it might be; and even as she cried she felt a sense of relief knowing she wouldn't have to struggle to sort truth from lie anymore, because it didn't matter anymore.

"You should sleep," came his voice. It was familiar, but different, and memory was so strange, and her mind, she knew, wasn't what it was; and who was she to know who was who, what was what, anymore? She could confuse the touch of a killer with that of a lover.

The wind was loud again outside the tent. The ground swayed beneath her. She closed her eyes, dreamt she was on a ship, and then dreamt nothing.

* * *

In the morning he heated water and she drank, turning away from him, pressing her hand to the crown of her head as if to conceal her face and her tears. She choked at the food and said nothing when Sasuke apologized for its tastelessness. He'd grown used to it; he'd lived on powdered fat and water, and leather heated over a dying fire; the slivers of chocolate that clung to the inside of an empty pouch.

This far north he could expect nothing else, but soon they would be heading home, passing through town and villages. The thought made him breathless and he wondered if it was for happiness or for fear that his heart beat like it did. There was a letter he would need to post, and he wrote it that afternoon. Sugi Rie recovered, it read. Physical condition OK. Sugi Ryota dead of exposure and malnutrition.

He wanted to say something to her, something about her brother, something comforting, but he'd been alone too long to form words of such depth; in the night he'd squeezed her hand in hopes that it could provide more reassurance than his ineffective words. Instead of speaking he offered her more food and more water, and she bundled herself in the extra jackets he gave her and sat with the hoods and face cover pulled, still. She stared at the wall opposite him and was quiet.

"Are you hurt anywhere?" he asked. "Your fingers were broken. What else did they do?" He wondered if his words were too abrupt.

"No," she managed. Her voice was raspy, older than her 17 years. He remembered her thin face , slack with sleep and grey with sickness, and it struck him how much people could change in 5 years. The portrait of her at 12 seemed to be another person. Sasuke was tempted to raise a hand to his face, to find out how much it had changed. Would anyone recognize him? "No," the girl said again, and she shifted, buried in cloth. "Nothing." She fumbled for the water at her feet and held the flask upside down in her hands for a moment.

"The nearest village is about 170 miles away," he said. "But we can stay there for a while, and you can rest more comfortably."

"I just want to go home," he thought he heard her say, but when he asked her to say again, she was quiet.

* * *

One day he pulled his tent from beneath the scrubby trees that somehow still stood in this wasteland of ice. He filled the latrine and the fire pit in with snow and ice, kicked over the bare space left where his home had once stood.

"Rie," he said. She stood swaying and swaddled in the snow, unmoving. "Let's go."

She was still until he took her hand; then she took a couple staggering steps, her free arm outstretched as if for balance.

"I can't," she said. They'd walked a painfully small distance. Sasuke shifted his shoulders under the pack he wore.

"Will you be able to hold on if I carry you?" he asked. When she said nothing he knelt in front of her and pulled her hands over his shoulders. "Can you hold on?" he asked.

"Yes," she managed, and he could hear the tears in her thickening voice.

"What's wrong?" he asked. "What hurts?"

"Me," she said. "You have to carry me."

Sasuke took a step forward and the pack that he dragged behind scrapped noisily on the ice. "It's nothing," he said. Did he feel the bones of her legs, even through all of these layers, or was he imagining it? "You're light," he said. "It's like I'm carrying nothing."

She cried any way, almost noiselessly; but how could he help but hear her when her chin rested above his shoulder, beside ear?

"Two weeks," he said, and he hoped his voice was reassuring. "We can make it there in two weeks."


	3. Chapter 3

Her body lost some substance in its death and laid curled like a snail, elbows against ribs and knees against forehead. He closed his eyes and knelt because he was dizzy with death; it hung thick in the air like a smoke or a smell. "I found you," he whispered, even though it was too late, and before his courage left him he touched her shoulder. It was glass-like, empty-feeling and fragile beneath his hand. It's hollowness seemed to infect him; he felt it in the pit of his stomach, eating away at the heaviness there, his soul maybe. He pulled her onto her back and her limbs unfolded mechanically, or like a flower, opening, and her spine was bright white, shining almost through the absence of skin, muscle, and organ. What had he done? Her body's gaping burned at his eyes; he turned away but now it showed itself in negative against the back of his lids. She was cut away from rib to hip and now no matter how he tried to fold her again, to cross her arms and draw her knees over that emptiness, it showed; it couldn't be hidden.

"How long have you been out here?" A whisper and a touch at his cheek. Neji opened his eyes and there were Ten Ten's bruised-looking knees. "You can't sleep?" she asked softly. He looked away, rubbed at his eyes with a hand. "Your cousin," said Ten Ten. She touched her hand to his hair, let him rest his forehead against her leg.

"The same dream as always," he mumbled. "I thought I would come outside but..." His eyes lifted to the night. The stars were innumerable.

"Come back in." She stepped away and bent to pick up his hand, haul him to his feet. "Your leg. You're limping."

"It's nothing."

It was everything. She released her husband's hand and he sank into the darkness of the hallway, to the bedroom. Seven years of constant work took a toll on his body; new scars were no longer a novelty, and he was tired. Or, he had always been tired, but more so now, tired enough to agree when she said, "that's enough". He had no strength to fight her when she said, "it's been long enough. Stay with me." And now this dream, in which he finally finds Hinata but she is dead and disemboweled. Further proof, she thought, that his mind needed rest. The other day she sat at the desk with their bills and her calculations turned from groceries to the days that she'd been without him, and it didn't seem possible that they could have been married for four years but only together for two, a few months, and a few days.

In the bed he was already asleep, on his back, one arm bent off the mattress and the other hanging over his eyes. She took his hand in hers and laid it on his stomach, and he didn't wake. For a while she stood contemplating him, and wondering about what he might be like had Hinata never left. Disappeared. Died. His strong chin wouldn't be marred by the scar along his jaw. His eyes wouldn't throb in those first seconds of waking, aching in the light. That wrinkle between his brows might be shallower. She pressed her lips to it, turned onto her side of the bed, and slept.

That Hyuuga Neji searched so tirelessly was no surprise to his family; least of all to Hanabi, his cousin. They'd grown closer as Hinata strayed further and further from the Hyuuga house; when she moved out of the compound altogether it was he who stood beside Uzumaki Naruto to carry her things away. "So the little thing is leaving, after all," Hanabi said to him, and he answered, "I'm glad she finally has the courage to." Naruto was draped over her, an arm on her shoulder and the other side of his body laden with bags, and they heard nothing but each other. "You'll be begging to come back, you know," Hanabi said. She held out a small bag by its drawstrings. "Once I get a hold of this place, you'll all be begging to come back." It spun beneath her fingers and she dropped it into his waiting. "A parting gift," she said. "If you'd give it to her."

The necklace it contained hung around Hinata's neck until the day she disappeared. Then they found it on the north side of the outskirts of town, hung on a stone and still clasped, as if it had been place there. Inside was a picture of Naruto, and he cried when he received it. It hung around his neck on the long nine months he spent searching for the girl he'd been first engaged to; the girl he first loved. It hung around his neck until his fiancée, Sakura, hid it in the bottom of a drawer and told him it was lost so many times that she'd forgotten it was a lie. He'd given up searching long before that, but always, Hyuuga Neji was looking.

Hyuuga Neji married but three months later there came word of a strange kidnapping 400 miles east. He left for six months to investigate and returned empty-handed, with heavier eyes and ten pounds lost off his broad frame. For seven months after he stayed close to home, but soon there was news of a girl found - matching Hinata's description, mute and deaf it seemed, maybe too old to be her, but he had to try – and his wife Ten Ten packed his bag for him and sat praying at a shrine for hours the day he left. Bring him home safe, she prayed. Help him find her. But he came home tired and frustrated, and with no one. Still, she found herself kneeling, sat with her hands clasped tightly, rising hours later when her faith, fervor, and hope masked her sense of passing time and made her legs ache with cramped disuse. Years passed but her hope – for her husband's sake – never waned.

Hyuuga Hanabi never prayed. It was against her nature to believe that something other than her own hard work would bring about whatever she desired. In the two years after her sister's disappearance she dispatched men to every corner of the every land, and further. Her family rallied beneath her but soon the number of deaths outweighed the new information coming in, and things seemed to taper away and disappear, and she recalled her teams just as Konoha itself had done a year earlier.

Hinata is a memory now and nothing else, and so Hyuuga Hanabi lays flowers at her empty grave because she knew her sister – now dead - had enjoyed them, in life; not because she thought her sister watched from above, hung in the clouds, misty-looking and half see-through, or with wings and white robes. Neji, she thought, was upset because he helped her go, helped her leave the confines that had kept her safe from those previous attempts at spiriting her away when she was a small and big-eyed child; that's why he searched so tirelessly, and wished so earnestly that she was alive. If she was dead – and she was, probably, no use in lying to yourself about it – Neji would take some of that blame, because encouraging her out of the family's reach was like handing her in a bag to whomever might want her, for whatever reason. Naruto, she thought, should have some of that remorse. But he was married and had a child – children. He looked to the future now more than ever, and she couldn't fault him, she supposed, for turning away from a painful past, and the ghost that haunted it. She hated to see his laughing blue eyes sometimes, but Uzumaki Naruto would never be without a smile for long.

Uzumaki Naruto loved to smile. He smiled even in his sleep, or so he was told; he smiled when he was drunk, which wasn't often. A smile is multi-faceted, multi-purpose. It can soothe, it can cheer, it can lie. The moments Naruto didn't smile were the saddest of his life; the moments he faked a smile were just as difficult. But Naruto is human, and that is the human condition. To know happiness he had to know pain, and perhaps that is why, when his daughters smile at him, he feels such profound joy. The darkest parts of his memory had already begun to go grey and fuzzy, but he, with his eyes fixed to the horizon, doesn't notice. His daughters were beautiful; the oldest was just like her father, and the youngest, though she never spoke, had the most infectious laugh, the most beautiful grin he'd ever seen. Forgive him if he looked to these happier things and forgot (for most of the year, until the month turned to anniversaries of death and leaving) those others that pulled at his gut and the corners of his mouth and his heart at the same moment. Uzumaki Naruto is only human, and it is human to forget pain.

And so pain must often remind the forgetful of its presence.

Had Hyuuga Hinata ever felt pain? It was what many people wondered at some point following her disappearance and death. The short, vague answer was yes. She'd known the pain of what seemed to be unrequited love; the pain of being unable to measure up; the pain of being hated. But she grew and those pains seemed to vanish. She was loved and that love gave her some courage, and that courage gave her self-confidence, and that self-confidence won her respect, when she'd only had sympathy as a child.

But that isn't the answer people want to hear; it isn't _that _question that people are asking. Did Hyuuga Hinata feel pain, they wonder, when she died? There is someone who knows, they know; they just don't know who it is. They are only left with speculation, and speculation says yes, she must have known pain, and intimately. A knife in the back or the chest, or across the belly. A rope round the wrists and the neck. Poisons. Fists to the head. Fire or water or earth to fill her throat. So many terrible ways, and she deserved none of them. But the necklace, laid on the rock still clasped, as if still around her neck. Perhaps she only disappeared. Perhaps it was quick and painless. She stood there one moment and the next she was gone, poof, sublimated, a vapor in the air.

The guessing could go on forever, but people lose interest in things that are dark and gruesome, because they so often come about. The Sugi children were kidnapped the following year, and Hyuuga Hinata flittedout of collective thoughts and returning only occasionally and momentarily, like a fog in morning that is gone when the sun rises. And so Hyuuga Hinata disappeared, one could say, for a second time.

* * *

Sasuke didn't wake with the light, but with the hunger that burned in his gut, and flared under his ribs. The routine had continued unchanged for years and hunger was a companion now, just like the hazy misdirection of night that left him struggling anew to comprehend his life when he woke and found his dreams were nothing but. The food, what little there was remaining, had to go to the girl, though she couldn't bring herself to walk, and he carried her through the cold and felt the energy strip from his body like sweat from his pores. He woke and drank hot water that no longer tasted of tea, and stared at where the girl laid and calculated, in his head, their chances.

It was the second day that they had walked - only 18 miles, by his count. It wasn't fast enough. If they left early today, they might travel farther, make up the lost time; if he could only wake her. She was swathed in blankets and jackets and as he pressed his hands over top of them it was hard to feel any movement. The hair that tumbled messily into view was still. He touched his hand again to the blanket and wondered, for a brief moment, if she was simply too tired to wake, or dead. When he pulled at a jacket her face slid into view, and it was pale and lifeless, and so different from the photograph he'd carried, and he wondered what had happened to her, that she seemed so much older than her 17 years. He'd seen scars like pinpricks on her wrists and now as he stared at her face there were scars that showed themselves, tiny and flat, on her eyelids. The Sugi bloodline gave them the ability to interpret the twitches of a liar's face; the brother and sister's lavender eyes, then – the tools their family had used with such benefit to Konoha's interrogations – were what the men who kidnapped them hoped to take.

She was strangely unsettled with him, he knew. She might cling to his arm and then suddenly jerk away when he spoke. She refused to look him in the face but always sat with her head tilted toward him, as if expecting him to move or speak, expression invisible. She didn't trust him entirely. The night before he'd pulled his protector from his pack and held it out to her as some kind of reassurance, hoping the familiar symbol etched on its metal surface would give her some push, something to work toward, but she didn't take it in her hands and after a moment he pulled away and hid it again in the recesses of his bag.

"Rie," he said, loudly. Her eyes didn't even stir beneath her lids. He pulled the jacket away and peeled a blanket back. Her lips, slightly opened, looked painfully chapped. "Rie."

He wished he could put her more at ease; he wished he could make things less painful for her. There were things he should say, things he could do to help her, but he couldn't name the words, the actions didn't come easily to him. He wished he could empathize the way Naruto would be able to, but maybe that part of him was faulty. All he could manage was courtesy, and it seemed too dry.

Sasuke pressed his hand to the blanket above her shoulder. Maybe he should let her sleep the day, he thought. Or maybe he should push her until they reached the village, where she could rest, see a doctor, eat something real. Only 18 miles in two days. They were already slow and behind. "Rie," he said, and shook her. She would have to wake up. "We have to get going."

Her hands were stronger than he might expect; or maybe it was just that her fingers were nothing but sharp bone and bit at the skin as they grasped at his wrist. "No," she gasped. Her hand pressed itself to his face and her nails curled into the skin beneath his eye. "No," she managed again, and even though her breath was already leaving her she struggled to kick at him.

What dreams did she have? The night prior she wept in her sleep and mumbled words he couldn't make out, uncurling and turning onto her back as she laid on a table. She cried and the sound was eerie, infected his dreams when he somehow slept. Who was she running from now? Who was she dreaming of? "You're in the tent, you're OK," he said. "Calm down. You're going to hurt yourself." He took her shoulders in her hands and pushed her back from him; her fingers pulled away from his face and she held her hands open, wary, beside his arms. Her eyes were wide and terrified in her face.

Wide and white in her face.

Sasuke felt that throbbing in his chest grow until his whole chest seemed to hum with his heartbeat. She shrunk between his hands and lifted her wrists over her face, as if folding into herself, and he grasped her fingers in his own and pulled them from the white eyes they shadowed. She was painfully familiar.

"Hinata," he said, and could manage nothing else. Her thin arms relaxed under his hands; she blinked and breathed for what seemed the first time since waking.

"I was dreaming," she whispered. "I was dreaming that I was still there and you hadn't found me." Her face tightened and her pale eyes disappeared beneath her lashes. "But I was just dreaming."

"How," he said, but shut his mouth. He'd only meant to think it. _How are you here, when they said you were dead?_

Where was the girl he'd been sent after?

He released her shoulders and her eyes opened, flickered over his face. She reached out and her fingers jabbed at his cheek. Her touch reminded him of moon-like divots there, weeping blood, just beneath his eye, and he turned his head from her clumsy hand.

"Don't," she whispered. Then, more fiercely, "Don't be so quiet anymore!" One palm struck at his cheek, held itself there, and the other followed to press itself to the left side of his face, more gingerly. Her eyes moved as if she watched a movie projected somehow against his skin. "Why are you like this? Say something!"

He could catch, dimly, his reflection in her wide, clouded eyes. Sasuke's hands hovered just above hers, hesitant to touch her. Desperation? Anger? It was too vague, too strange, too unreadable in her eyes. "What do you want me to say?" he asked quietly. He covered her hands with his own and pulled them from his face.

Her mouth tightened. "I don't know." Her voice was weak again; her face tired. "Your voice is different. You're different. Everything is different!" She pulled her fingers from his careful hands and turned her face from him.

Loneliness. That, maybe, is what he'd seen in the wideness of her eyes; that's why her hands shook against his skin and why she spoke so informally and earnestly with him, her only companion, a relic from her past and so familiar to her. "It's been seven years," he whispered to her. "Of course things have changed." That was the wrong thing to say. It sounded cruel, coming from his mouth, he realized. Her shoulders rose.

"What else has changed?" Her voice was small. "You have. I have."

Sasuke sat and said nothing. Anger flared in him often, too. It was easy to be angry at change but it was a futile exercise, and the heat of that hatred for circumstance faded quickly. Her voice, he thought, would grow calmer if he listened. Her body would relax. She might stop shaking. Or had she been like this before? It was hard for him to remember her; it seemed he'd almost forgotten her. It was a painful thought; one that made him ashamed. She wept bitterly as if she knew his mind, and her voice was brittle.

"Your feelings?" Her head lifted and she pressed her fist beneath an eye. "For me? Have those changed too?" she asked. "Because they haven't changed for me. That you would be there for me, that was the only thought that... That's the only thing that's keeping me alive, all of this time that I... I would have given up but I saw your face so clearly and it..." Her hands opened over her face, tight-fingered. "And now you're here and I can't see you at all." She lifted her head suddenly, face wet with sweat. "I can't see you at all!"

There was that throbbing, again. His chest was cold, colder than this hands, his nose. He opened his mouth, reconsidered, shut it tightly. She was blind. She'd stumbled in the snow and he'd thought she was weak; held the canteen upside down and poured their water onto her lap, and he'd thought she was tired. His stomach washed cold and he looked away from her, and back, ashamed again. Seven years. Everyone thought she was dead. Naruto, though he'd searched as long as he could bear to, had stopped. Did she sense, somehow, that she was forgotten?

Sasuke's gaze followed the blood beginning to leak from the curved indention, self-inflicted and nail-shaped, above her blind eye and thought: _how can I tell you that I'm not him? That he isn't looking for you? That no one is?_ He couldn't say that; he didn't know what to say. Her hands were shaking and looked so frail, too white and child-like, as if she might break. If he could see her mind, maybe it would be like that too, delicate and like porcelain, held in clumsy hands.

He wished Naruto had found her, instead of him. Maybe she would smile. Maybe her eyes would be less sad. Her eyes. They hardened slowly as his silence grew; they were wary in her head as it tilted one way, the other. "Naruto," she said. Then, panicked, loudly, "Naruto!" The blankets constrained her; she struggled out, limbs shaking, but couldn't pull her legs from beneath their weight. She cried.

That was enough. Why didn't he say something, let her know he was there? It was because words had left him. He grasped her skinny elbow and she latched to his arm.

"Bastard," she wept. "Why are you doing this? Why are you doing this again? What more do you want?" Her voice rose to a scream.

Wait, he wanted to say. Something had changed; the anger was different. She fell against him and her hands were at his face again, painful on his mouth, over his eyes. He tried to capture her wrists in his hands but she was suddenly off him and struggling over the floor. He watched her stumble over his pack, overturn the bottle of snow melting into water. She was searching for a way out but in the tiny space it was easy to catch her. "Wait," he said, and held her ankle, her wrist, then her shoulder. She was still beneath his hand but even through the many layers of her clothing he felt the tension in her body. Her breath rattled in her chest and whistled through her throat.

"I'll kill myself," she hissed, and even though her eyes were wet with tears he felt that hate in them. For a moment they looked like his own. "You bastard." Her hot gaze was fixed just above his shoulder and the cords of her neck strained with her breath. "Did you kill him?" she asked suddenly. "You bastard, after everything else you've done to me!"

"Who do you think I am?" The words came from his mouth on their own accord as he thought them, and the breath pulsing in her throat stopped for the smallest of moments. He would remember her expression periodically through out the night as he laid thinking, thinking of his next step, and wondering if what he'd decided to do was a mistake. That expression, resigned, dispirited, as if he'd struck her in the face and did it often, as if she had some murderous intent toward him that had turned, suddenly, on herself.

She seemed hollow.

"Please don't do this," she whispered. "Just tell me." Her blind eyes closed and she covered them with shaking hands. "Just tell me, are you him?" Her voice was almost too soft to hear. "Are you Naruto, or not?"

Sasuke took his hand from her shoulder. "I'm Naruto," he said. The sweat that had prickled over his skin only now began to chill him. "I'm Naruto." And it was too late to take it back.

Dread was heavy in his stomach.

* * *

Well, readers of the first version of this story saw definitely this twist coming! (I'm sure some new readers did, too.) But I hope I made it new and interesting. I'm fairly happy with this chapter, though it's short, so I hope you've enjoyed it too. And thank you, of course, for the lovely reviews!

I haven't written everything absolutely clearly yet, but hopefully a few more details have come clear in this chapter, even though the narrative jumps around a bit from character to character, time to time, place to place. As for the reason behind the kidnapping of the two children Sasuke was sent after, a bit is revealed here, but more will be revealed as chapters continue. It took a while for this chapter to be finished, I know, and I can't promise a quick update, but rest assured I will be working on it. I like the narrative technique I've been using (hope you do too) and this story is good practice; I'll try my hardest to keep up the quality.

(Also, I'm not the greatest at catching typos, etc. If you find one that especially bothers you, or causes some confusion, please tell me and I'll correct it.)


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